All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.Jack Ohman, Portland Oregonian

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Offering a grammar lesson guaranteed to make any English teacher cringe, President George W. Bush told a group of New York school kids on Wednesday: “Childrens do learn.”

Bush made his latest grammatical slip-up at a made-for-TV event where he urged Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, the centerpiece of his education policy, as he touted a new national report card on improved test scores.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush and Congress are headed toward another showdown on war spending, this time sparring over nearly $190 billion the Pentagon says is needed to keep combat in Iraq afloat for another year.

Sen. Robert Byrd, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, vowed Wednesday not to “rubber stamp” the request and said it was time to put Bush’s policies in check.

“We cannot create a democracy at the point of a gun,” said Byrd, D-West Virginia, whose speech during a Senate hearing on the spending request was interrupted several times by cheers of anti-war protesters.

(AP) Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield sought the ruling in a lawsuit against the federal government after he was mistakenly linked by the FBI to the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in 2004.